"We need to look at things in a different way" - Interview with Jeff Patton

Jeff joined Celerant in 2002 after 15 years in a variety of UK and European leadership roles in the Chemical and Polymer industry, mainly with GE. Whilst there, he held posts in Sales, Purchasing, Consulting, Quality, Business Management and Merger Integration.

Jeff is currently responsible for the successful delivery of Lean & Six Sigma (DMAIC/DfSS) client deployments and the overall capability and skills development in a Global Consulting team.

He has worked with blue-chip clients to deploy major change programmes with substantial benefits: GE (Plastics, Finance & Medical), BT Openreach, Shell, SFR (Vodafone), Centrica, SCA, Basell, Ericsson, Linde, Huntsman, Thyssen, Degussa, Roche, DSM, Aviva (Norwich Union) and Abbott Laboratories.

Jeff was certified a Black and Master Black belt from GE Corporate (1999) & Celerant (2003).

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What does Six Sigma mean to you?

onesixsigma.com: What does Six Sigma mean to you?

Jeff Patton: For me it’s got several levels. Six Sigma is a banner title for an array of well established tools and methodologies. When used correctly, it’s the best of a bunch of methodologies that have been out there for the last 20 years for delivering step change results. It’s got the best track record and the best real savings attributed to it of any business improvement methodology: but it must be combined with a robust change approach with true end to end process improvement and not become a training event.

Do you combine Six Sigma with Lean and/or other methodologies?

When we do a business analysis, or a project and programme design, we’re looking at all of the elements of our 5-Box Model®, especially the key behavioural change elements of : People, Processes and Management Systems. And we’re looking at what is it that we need to do to maximise that profound behaviour change. Our real skill is how we blend and integrate technical tools and methods (e.g. Lean or Supply chain) that we have in our business with our tactical ability to engage, coach and mentor people through profound change. The analysis is the critical path for us because we need to establish what current reality is in a business and what the size of the challenge is to take them to their aspirations, where they want to go to.

5 Box Model®

So it really is a fine skill of blending those key elements. We might use Six Sigma tools and techniques to define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in order to measure the current baseline performance of a process. But alongside that we might do DILO (Day In a Life Of) studies and Behavioural studies to find out what people do; why they do certain things and why they don’t do certain things. Then finally we look at the management systems to understand whether those behaviours are being driven by the lack of, or the wrong type of measurements of people.

All the time we’re building this picture to find out what we need to give their people in order for them to be able to attack these problems. How are we going to help them to achieve success other than just training and coaching, and how are we going to connect the aspiration and the current reality together and what’s that path. That’s what you’re trying to articulate for a client and the tools and techniques are just enablers.

So you see the methodologies as one big toolbox essentially, and you take that knowledge and apply it according to the needs of the individual organisation?

Exactly. Many clients say to us “we want Six Sigma”. Well, they get Six Sigma, but they get a lot of other things as well. They get MCRS®, for example, as a work-stream in every project because we know that can help drive behaviours. That’s one element. But it also does two other things: it takes that initiative from being stand-alone into being a business objective. And also its an engine: it generates the next set of improvement goals. So that’s why in every project we have MCRS®, and that’s a methodology of our own perfected over many years and standard training element for all our consultants

We also have developed a new concept called Value Force™. Value Force™ is a high-level business diagnostic. It quantifies and qualifies the business in terms of the level of real value opportunity for share-holders. Additionally, it tells you where to target the resources of your improvement programme, whether it’s Six Sigma, Lean, Asset Management or Supply Chain management: wherever your skilled resources are, it’s about targeting them effectively. It’s not just talking about the existing business, it’s talking about how a business creates value in their organisation, and delivers that value. So it covers all the angles and interfaces of a business and allows us to design a transformational programme for the business.

The high level diagnostic score

Unless it’s a process or a function, people don’t believe they can touch it, but there’s a whole host of other things going on that are non-value add. Take R&D, the amount of products that they have on the shelf that they’ve been working for many years, quite often in a 6 month technology market is often astounding. That’s not a process, that’s just understanding what the market needed at the time and executing it so what prevented that from happening?

When you go into an organisation and instigate an improvement programme, what are the biggest challenges you face?

There are several things: pre-conceptions, fatigue and longevity. Without doubt the biggest problem with Six Sigma is that most people think they know what Six Sigma and Lean are. They’ve read a few books, they’ve hired or maybe trained a few people, and that is without doubt a big problem because there is then this misconception that it's about training lots of people, it's about selecting individual, manageable projects, it's about applying it to areas where you have to have lots of data.

These are the pre-conceptions people have of what Lean and Six Sigma is all about, so you have to tell them actually its not. The training and coaching element will be delivered as an integral part of the programme. But first, it’s about what is your current reality? What is your business actually like? Are you ready for Six Sigma? Do you need Lean? Or do you in fact need something else to prepare you for change. Challenging them to think about how they want to achieve with it, what is their goal, how fast do they want to go, and are they ready to do that. Is it realistic or should we be doing something fundamentally different?

Secondly we have to address momentum and inertia. Many companies do lots of initiatives or change programmes, be it IT, Six Sigma, TQM, behaviour change or cultural programmes. The trouble is they get tired of them, they get fatigued.

Finally, longevity with Lean and Six Sigma is a big issue as the 'fruit' disappears and the problems become larger or more complex – if you don’t have a robust connection to strategic intent and refresh your programme then you will hit problems. Another area of concern we have to address is project selection – too many deployments rely on management workshops for project identification when a well defined data-driven baseline utilising Value Stream mapping and baseline techniques will always define great projects with larger ROI for the business.

How do you then re-invigorate the programmes?

There are different ways. One of the things we do is to go back in and do an assessment of the programme. We’ve got a process excellence sustainability pyramid and we use that to asses the programme and find where the issues are. Project selection is always an issue. Either too big, too small, no support, or it’s being treated like a hobby. Project Selection, if you start properly will take you a long way.

Process Excellence Sustainability Pyramid

In my view, project selection needs to be a specialism within a business. We’ve had many occasions where the client has said: "What you do in your analysis is fantastic, we need people to do that" and we agree, but that’s often not what they buy. They think it's about getting the implementation programme going and getting people through the training and coaching and doing some projects. So that always comes up. And it becomes even more difficult if you’re not doing it in a robust data driven way – which comes back to MCRS® - because all the 'fruit' gone.

Then you get the other problem that many of the training houses are scared to use the advanced technical tools. If you talk to a transactional or service company, they‘ll tell you: "we don’t want DoE, we can’t use that". And we say: "But why? You need it. When the fruit is gone, your problems are going to become quite complex and you need to be pulling the right levers. You don’t know the solutions anymore." And quite often it’s because it’s easier for some companies to sell a basic set of tools & techniques, do some basic training and coaching. They get the quick results, but it dries up.

It’s about patience as well: how do you pick your programme, how do you align it, are you picking random projects. If you generate a 3 or 5 year picture - a multi-generational plan – you can plan out what you need to do and what things to tackle.

Like when to employ Design for Six Sigma?

DfSS is a prime example of that. I’ve had clients who want to jump straight in with DfSS: "let’s re-design everything". But they don’t understand what could be improved in their business today, which might be dramatically better than where they are. You need to understand your current capability in your business versus the customer requirements. If you don’t know how good or bad you are versus them, why would you go straight to DfSS?

It comes down to understanding your baseline current reality versus your requirements and how good or how bad you are. If you’re really bad, or you don’t have a process, then I agree. But it’s about establishing that current reality: what have you got today and where do you want to go.

Would that be the thing that’s most commonly overlooked in a deployment?

Most people would tell you that it’s about senior management buy in and that’s important in any change programme. But especially if you're talking about an LSS programme it's about establishing where you are, and then what are the projects that are going to get you to where you want to be. It is that detailed, you have to plan it ahead. Someone said the other day: "most people spend their time planning the wedding and not the marriage".

Without doubt for me, the two most important things are the ongoing rigorous project selection and a team of specialists who do that at a business strategic level, across the business processes and/or functions. And what is your business plan, are you planning ahead? What does the marriage look like? Do you want to have DfSS in two years or five years?

What specialist methods do you use in your deployments?

Closework® is our DNA for the way we work. Whether we’re deploying Value Force™, Six Sigma or a general improvement programme, Closework® is our consulting model for the way we relate and blend with our client’s people and it starts from day one of any engagement.

Closework Theory of Intervention™

For example, during analysis we have to build the current reality story but the first thing we do is to limit the number of Celerant people. We want a team of client task force to work with us, alongside a sponsor and a governing structure.

Our first task is to put a roadmap in front of people and walk them through the key milestones. We set everything around those milestones in the first stage. We place our team members to lead each study plan area with their task force and they do the work. We teach, we coach and we mentor their people how to do the studies. They establish the current reality in their business, how to get data, how to interpret that data. We coach them through that and get them to present the results back to their own business. After a lot of groundwork, a lot of preparation, then they feel confident – in many cases for the first time ever – to say to their COO: "This is what we’ve found. We have checked this, we have verified this and the size of the business case is significant when we implement change in this organisation." And I’m not just talking financial improvement, I’m talking about operational, behavioural and service improvement.

The effect is that the Client will see his people having done these great studies, usually for the first time, that they feel good about it and they want to implement it. Then we start to hand over to our operations people, the team that we’re going to put in for the project. We build the price for the roll-out. We build the milestones that we have to deliver. We also build the engagement plans for the bigger deployment as you don’t touch everyone during the analysis. We build the governance structure - the actual roadmap - of the activities that need to be done for every month and report back, and we do it all with the actual people. So we build the momentum from day one so there’s a belief amongst them that they can do it, that it’s attainable, and then they do it. We transfer our knowledge and experience to them through the mentoring, and we let them fail sometimes, because that’s how you learn. And then we pick them up and we have a go again. It’s all about preparation and real life application.

I remember a story from a project in an oil field in Norway. As part of the programme we were doing some MCRS® training. And one of the problems was getting the senior management to turn up to the meetings, they were always too busy. We were making progress but even their own people were noticing it. So we got all the secretaries and PA’s in and gave them MCRS® training, then they actually managed the guys diaries better so that they could turn up to the meetings!

These are some of the things that seem quite trivial, but in the scope of a bigger project these small things can make a huge difference. And you don’t get that if you go in with a pre-defined model of how you’re going to roll-out: that Six Sigma is 4 weeks of training and 12 weeks of coaching or whatever. Yeah, you’ll get some results, but they’re not sustainable.

When Celerant goes away, we want to go back in two years and see the guys taking it further. I can tell you we have many, many programmes where that happens. We can still reference clients two, three years down the line and say: "please tell this client what we did for you, but don’t tell them about the results: tell them about Closework®, tell them about how we worked with you."

What are your feelings on certification? Do you advocate a fixed number of belts? Do you believe there should be an agreed certification standard?

I don’t believe in an arbitrary 1% or 2%. That’s all based on the theory of the $250,000 dollar Black Belt: if you want $10million of savings, then divide that by 250,000 and there’s your number of Black Belts. People still do that today! I had a client the other day tell me he needed 200 Black Belts. I said why? He said because he needed €10million savings. I said what about if I told you I could do it with 10 BBs?

So I’m not a believer in advocating fixed number of belts. I’m a big advocate of certification, but most certification procedures talk about the training and they talk about doing one, sometimes two projects. Which is ok, but for me its more about what are the benefits that you drove, what are the tactical things you had to get over about change?

I would rather see a certification process that says: "yes you did the technical, yes you did training, but you also did the projects that needed tactical ability as well as technical ability". Then I can see that that person can step up to do the big projects or be part of a team driving big projects because it’s the tactical thing that prevents people from being able to do the big projects. How to handle the politics, how to handle the senior people, how to engage people in a change programme.

I can tell you that our certification process is one of the toughest out there and we do make our people go through certification again when we hire them, because we add new skills. To be honest, most of our people need to be MBBs for our projects anyway so it’s difficult to compare our programme to a BB one.

There is no set standard, and we probably do need one. I interview lots of BBs and MBBs every day of the week and in my view the standard is all over the place.

How do you see the future of Lean and Six Sigma in particular and business improvement in general?

I could be very biased and say Value Force™ is the answer! But it's not, it's one answer. My view is that there are a couple of fabulous books out there that really capture the true essence of what Six Sigma & Lean can do. The book by Breyfogle "Implementing Six Sigma: Smarter Solutions Using Statistical Methods" for example, is fabulous for technical Six Sigma delivery for Black Belts, I’d recommend that every day of the week.

If a group of recognised Lean Six Sigma practitioners got together and selected the top two or three books for the different areas and they were then advertised as the best for the CEOs and COOs to read, then that would help a lot, as a start to get people thinking about it.

It’s future, for me... we’ve done some analysis of our own: something like only 20% of the Fortune 500 are still using or have deployed Six Sigma. That means that 80% are still thinking about it, so it’s not dead by a long shot. I believe it needs a rethink about how consultants are deploying it, because for me the days of just training and the $250,000 Black Belt need to be consigned to the annals of history as they damage the true potential. We are investing some several million Euros each year in developing new models, new IP and concepts such as Value Force™ to make sure we lead the way in opening up new avenues for Six Sigma and Lean thinking.

We need to drag it out of the training/coaching mould and combine it with other things. In Europe, companies don’t like SS because it has a lot of bad publicity as well as good so they adapt it rather than adopt it.

There is a lot of room still for business and process improvement. When Toyota say they still have 75% non-value add in their business then you have to believe there is still a long way to go. We need to look at it in a different way, we need to combine it with the power of other methods – not just Lean, I’m talking about Supply Chain, Organisational Design and Innovation. It’s much more powerful when combined and it’s softer. It takes the edge off it when you're told you have to train armies of people and have a separate organisation to run it. That’s just not true.

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Celerant are the largest independent Operational Consulting firm in the world, employing some 600 people globally.

www.onesixsigma.com/celerant